Out of the Park Baseball 24 - Baseball in Buffalo (Ep 4) - Expansion Draft!

After building out our minor league system over the past three years, it's time for the Buffalo Wings organization to start getting ready for its first major league action in 2026. A key first step will be adding some legitimate major league talent in the expansion draft. Did we make the right choices?
For those looking for the post from ZenMasta61 in the OOTP subreddit that inspired this series, the link follows: / how_to_create_a_more_r...

[@joedoutrich3221]

Very happy you were able to post this episode so fast. I’m liking the series.

[@oldschoolsports]

Thanks, appreciate you watching!

[@patrickdebonis6493]

Brady House is on Nashville too

[@aaronstockmeister2999]

I did this exercise a few months ago and if I were to do it again, I think I’d create the temporary team (Jacksonville in your case) and use them for the seasons where you only have minor league teams, then would expand Buffalo and just move the minor league teams over from Jacksonville to Buffalo. The way you (and I) did it, 3 seasons of not playing in the majors burns most of the fan interest and owner leniency that is built into the expansion. I think the only drawback is that moving your scouting director would reset all your scouting but since you have to be in commissioner mode, anyway, you can just force a rescout

[@aaronstockmeister2999]

I really enjoyed seeing you go through this and comparing it to my experience

[@oldschoolsports]

@@aaronstockmeister2999 Thanks for watching, it definitely has been fun to build a franchise from scratch... at least the best way to do so I have come across. Hope you enjoyed yours as well!

[@JackhammerPossessor]

I cant believe Jace is not a top 100 prospect.

[@oldschoolsports]

Yeah, the OSA scouts love Medina, which is nice, but Jace gets no respect. He just hit .312-29 HR -101 RBI in AAA, a year after going .280-34 HR-106 RBI across AA and A ball... for him to be the #154 prospect in baseball there must be some loaded minor league systems!!!

[@yungchris6044]

I hope Bohrofen has some staying power in your plans. I’m all for one guy’s entire career being with one team and from opening day from a franchise beginnings til retirement. He’s got enough talent to suggest at least that.

[@oldschoolsports]

Definitely would like to build around him, hopefully I can make that happen and he delivers on the field!

[@kevin1153]

And the first ever pick of the franchise if I recall

[@patrickdebonis6493]

You are going to want to DFA as many of these expansion draftees as you can. The reason for this is so you can raid the Rule 5 Draft. You aren't going anywhere next year. So, there is no worries about carrying a high potential player that might not be MLB ready yet. Fill up your 40 with them. If worse comes to worse, you can always return them. Next, when you finish Spring Training, keep as many Rule 5 players as you can and demote guys with options as necessary. The following year, you can bring them back up and demote the former Rule 5 guys to complete their development. This will give your upper minors a huge boost

[@oldschoolsports]

Definitely. Rule 5 could be huge for us the next couple seasons, I hope there are some interesting guys available!

[@markntexas8265]

Enjoying this especially the prolific posting

[@oldschoolsports]

Thanks... unfortunately the pace of posting will come to an end now that the episodes I worked on all week are up, but I will try to keep things going the best I can!

[@patrickdebonis6493]

Breaking the fourth wall is where the actor addresses the audience directly. In the movie "Let It Ride," actor Richard Dreyfuss does this after he is propositioned by a beautiful woman (,actress turned poker player) Jennifer Tilly. He looked into the camera and said "Am I having a great day, or what?" Thus, breaking the fourth wall

[@patrickdebonis6493]

Munoz is extremely popular. So, you're going to take a hit when you trade him.

[@oldschoolsports]

That's a good point. He accounted for some of the boost we got in fan interest following the expansion draft. I'm just struggling with the need to keep a high end closer on a team that's going to struggle to win 60 games, especially when I can probably get a good asset that is younger for him...

[@SamOliver4]

The setup exercise was really interesting. This is a pretty niche setup based on a pretty niche Reddit post, but I wonder if it would be at all possible to signal-boost this for the devs to look at. It would be nice for the expansion wizard to have an option to kind of take care of the setup for you so that you could much more easily run a realistic expansion scenario. Granted, it could be as much work for the OOTP programmers as it was for you (if not *more* work), so maybe it's not worth it, but I think that would be a cool system that they could even advertise somewhat for a sequel release. Love what you're doing so far and can't wait to see what befalls of the Buffalo Wings!

[@oldschoolsports]

Thank you. I agree it was a lot of work and certainly isn't perfect. It would be really cool if the devs did have something more like this set up to run automatically in the game. Maybe when real expansion is eventually announced in MLB and those teams have the opportunity to start building their farm systems ahead of time that will be the impetus for them to do what you suggest!

[@thomasmorganjr7267]

I always heard go strong up the middle (C-SS-CF) then fill in with best possible. Relievers early would go against the grain of logic.

[@kevin1153]

The expos need to be considered your top rival, makes sense to me with them both being “new” teams and geography

[@slothkng]

and now it begins in earnest

[@oldschoolsports]

That's right, time to get to the real work now! I probably could have spent more time perfecting the drafts and IAFA stuff in the previous episodes to build a better farm system, but I was eager to get to this episode so I could make sure this was all actually going to all work!

[@slothkng]

@@oldschoolsports yea I mean you put a lot into this entire set up and it's so much fun watching this all take shape....question if I may for the big games like the world series clinching games have you ever thought to use the watch feature

[@oldschoolsports]

@@slothkng I have never done it, but since I am doing so many different things in this playthrough I should probably try that at some point too!

[@vinnyt1140]

Consistency rating 80/80

[@oldschoolsports]

Ha, probably will start dipping soon unfortunately!

[@hugohurley5360]

I know i’m late, but these videos are awesome! go wings! cant wait. great job my friend

[@oldschoolsports]

Thank you for watching!

[@Jhay-nd8wb]

Do you think you could make a video actually showing us how we do everything for this? I read the reddit post but a visual on it would make it so much easier to understand. If not, I completely get it

[@oldschoolsports]

It's not on the top of my list right now since I just want to play the game after muddling through that sometimes confusing exercise, but it's not a bad idea for me to think about in the future. Thanks for the idea!

[@thomasmorganjr7267]

You are to create a Fiction League and move the "Real" Expansion Teams (Nashville and Buffalo) into that league using the edit league structure function, then move them back to MLB after the draft. This function went well for me recreating your play though using zenmasta post, except I created (tried to get cute) one Minor league team for the fake expansion teams, and then made a REAL STUPID mistake when I was transferring and accidently deleted one of my real minor league teams. I am watching you. I also am trying an experiment trying an idea for a delayed Expansion using Challenge Mode. I am finishing up season one, and it entails taking over a team in the Atlantic League and removing the Other Leagues can purchase players function and unlimited reserve roster size, which you can actually do in Challenge mode. After year three I will convert the Atlantic League to Affiliated long enough to promote the players I have cultivated into a minor league. I will however lose International FA, and the draft. I will subsist on players I cultivate only.

[@three-quartersbadger2929]

I don't understand why you had to add the two 'dummy teams'

[@oldschoolsports]

Can't do an expansion draft with existing teams, so since BUF and NAS were already in MLB, I had to put in those fake teams to run the expansion draft feature in OOTP.

[@three-quartersbadger2929]

It makes sense, but you surprised me with your league/playoff structure. I would have gone with 4 divisions of 4 teams each and a simpler playoff structure. I think that your method is basically the NHL setup, and I don't think that that works well without a 16-team playoff.

[@oldschoolsports]

I surprised myself too... I had been thinking eight divisions of four teams also, but started leaning towards the audible to two large divisions in each league over the past few days. I did not like my Southern divisions geographically, with Arizona grouped in with Atlanta, Miami and Washington in the NL. And if I moved ARZ to the AL South with the two Texas teams and Nashville, which was a little better geographically, then I would have ended up moving the Orioles to the NL South, which seemed odd. I'm sure there was an elegant solution I didn't think of. But I do like that the four division winners are the only teams that get byes in the setup I went with.

[@Pep8691]

Interesting but I like the idea. The only thing I think I would have personally done different is swapped Buffalo and Nashville. Buffalo natural rival with Toronto due to short distance and even the Yankees in New York state. And then Nashville and Atlanta being good geographical rivals.

[@oldschoolsports]

@@Pep8691 I think I agree with that, but being a Yankees fan I was trying to avoid Buffalo being in the same division as them. When I was planning on doing a four team NL East, it was going to be Buffalo, the Mets, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, so there would be a pair of potential in-state rivalries in the division between the larger cities from the Eastern part of the state versus the smaller cities from the Western part of the state. But Buffalo vs. Toronto and Buffalo vs. the Yankees would have also worked as well. With one permutation I even had the Blue Jays and Expos in the same division for the Canadian rivalry! But I've got what I've got now... for now, I can always change it!